Each year in Canada, roughly 6,500 individuals are released from federal prisons. Ex-prisoners face a range of challenges as they rejoin the community, including finding employment, reconnecting with family and friends, receiving care for physical and mental health issues, and navigating parole conditions. Not surprisingly, former prisoners tend to identify the weeks and months immediately following prison release as particularly overwhelming and daunting. The Parole Board of Canada often mandates that federal prisoners (i.e., those sentenced to a prison term of at least two years) spend the first six months of release at a community-based residential facility, commonly known as a halfway house. These transitional, NGO-operated institutions are officially tasked with providing reentry support (e.g., basic social services and rehabilitative programming), as well as ongoing supervision of individuals on conditional release. Despite their central role in ex-prisoner reintegration/supervision, little is known about how these penal institutions work and operate in ex-prisoners’ lives, and the role they occupy in broader penal processes. I seek to fill this gap by examining the perceptions and experiences of halfway house residents and workers in a north-western Canadian city. My analysis focuses on how halfway houses workers seek to govern halfway house residents during the early stages of reentry, and how former prisoners, in turn, experience, navigate, and make meaning of their time at the halfway house. I show that the diverse, and sometimes conflicting, perceptions of both halfway house residents and workers call for varied conceptualizations of halfway houses as penal sites. Specifically, I propose three ways to think through the role of halfway houses in Canada's penal system; those are (1) halfway houses as liminal sites; (2) halfway houses as mobility-producing sites; and (3) halfway houses as open prisons. These conceptualizations provide a more nuanced understanding of the different ways in which halfway houses impinge on ex-prisoners’ lives in both repressive and productive ways. Drawing on studies of punishment and prisoner reentry, I reflect on what these conceptualizations reveal about the lived realities of ex-prisoners and workers of the Canadian penal state.